Wien, Oktober 2015

A DISCUSSION WITH INCOMING DIRECTOR MATTI BUNZL SETTING FORTH EMPHASES AND PROJECTS FOR THE MUSEUM

Press conference: Thursday, 20 October, 10 a.m. Venue: Wien Museum , 1040 Press photos: www.wienmuseum.at/en/press

Statement by City Councillor for Culture, Andreas Mailath-Pokorny: “When we were searching for a new Wien Museum director last year, the choice that fell to us was an easy one: Matti Bunzl. He convinced us not only with his competence and concept for the museum. He also radiated the energy and enthusiasm necessary to carry on the Wolfgang Kos success story,” stated City Councillor for Culture, Mailath-Pokorny. “That initial impression did not disappoint. Already in his capacity as director-designate, Matti Bunzl immersed himself in the cultural life of Vienna, among other things serving as a jury member for the international architectural competition to design the new Wien Museum. I am convinced that, together with Financial Director Christian Kircher, Bunzl will successfully lead the city museum through these challenging times of transition, and that he will ensure that the Wien Museum maintains its presence in Vienna during its temporary closure.” Emphasized Mailath, “I wish him all the best in his endeavour to implement his vision for the new Wien Museum as a ‘laboratory of civil society’ where citizens find themselves on the trail of the city (der Stadt auf die Spur).”

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Internationalization

“It’s about presenting Vienna in a global context – Vienna from a global perspective that is both historical and contemporary.” Bunzl named two events that stand out as exemplary of the tone he seeks to set. On the first evening of his directorship, Bunzl will engage in a dialogue on the history of and Vienna with the internationally renowned historian, Pieter Judson, who teaches at the European University Institute in Florence. The title of the event is “Vienna Seen Globally.” Other top international scholars will again be guests of the Wien Museum in the near future. Among them is Timothy Snyder, specialist in Eastern European history and the Holocaust, who will introduce his new book, Black Earth , on October 21 in the Wien Museum.

Also in keeping with this international orientation is the new academic advisory council, which will come into being on October 1. Bunzl was able to acquire the services of the following experts who will sit as members of the advisory board: Pieter Judson (Chairperson), historian at the European University Institute, Florence; Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, art historian at the University of the Applied Arts, Vienna; Albert Lichtblau, historian at the University of Salzburg; Maria-Regina Knecht, vice-director and literary scholar at Webster University, Vienna; Birgit Lodes, music scholar at the ; Randeria Shalini, rector at the Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna, and social anthropologist at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva; Christoph Reinprecht, sociologist at the University of Vienna; Clemens Ruthner, literary scholar at Trinity College, Dublin; Brigitta Johanna Schmidt-Lauber, ethnologist of at the University of Vienna; Bernhard Tschofen, scholar of empirical culture at the University of Zürich; Heidemarie Uhl, historian at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna; and Larry Wolff, historian at New York University.

“The future will see the Wien Museum positioned even more strongly as a place of discussion (Ort des Diskurses), especially in relation to salient current themes and hot topics in the city and in society.” Two events emerge as paradigmatic. The new “2x45 Minutes” format, in which two highly-charged themes will be discussed back-to-back by experts in their respective fields, premiers on December 1. The intertwined themes of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia will start things off, with Julya Rabinowich, Vladimir Vertlib, Farid Hafez und Dudu Kücügöl taking part. Sets of themes envisioned for the future include cyclists/motorists and public space/private speculation respectively.

Also of contemporay relevance is the upcoming event for students that will take place on October 14. The event’s motto is “Bring your prejudices and put them to the test.” Nina Horaczeck and Sebastian Wiese’s book, Against Prejudice (Czernin Verlag), provides the backdrop and occasion for the event. Workshops will bring together students and museum visitors alike to analyze prejudices such as racism and homophobia.

2/9 The New Museum Building

A final sitting of the prize jury will convene at the end of November to determine the winning design project. The winner will be announced directly after the jury determination, and the design models will be unveiled as part of a presentation in the atrium.

Upcoming Exhibitions in 2016

The exhibition program for 2016 has been printed on a single sheet in the press packet. Following are three highlights of the Wien Museum exhibition calander for 2016. Early in the year, the museum will present a look back on the 250-year ’s in an exhibtion curated by Wien Museum vice-director, Ursula Storch. During the fall exhibition season, the Wien Museum will mount the first-ever large-scale exhibition recounting the history of sexuality in Vienna. Inspired by Michel Foucault, the exhibition adopts a cultural-historical perspective to explore modern sexuality as an urban invention. A further highlight in the fall is an exhibition of photographs by Robert Haas, one of the most important Austrian representatives of interwar photojournalism. Haas was forced to emigrate to the USA in 1938 and continued his occupational path as a graphic designer. The Wien Museum has recently purchased Haas’s archive of photographs.

The Chapel of St. Virgil (Virgilkapelle)

“Like hardly any other edifice in Vienna, the Chapel of St. Virgil allows us to experience a chapter of the city’s history, a chapter that nonetheless still poses many questions. For good reason the Middle Ages continues to fascinate us,” stated Matti Bunzl, the new director of the Wien Museum.

One of the best-preserved and largest medieval interiors, the Chapel of St. Virgil has been carefully and elaborately restored after its 2008 closure for conservation reasons. From December 12, the restored chapel interior will once again be open to public viewings. This 800-year-old auratic space will be complemented in the future by a small permanent exhibition on medieval Vienna.

A Flexible Museum

“Even though our core task is the conservation and research of objects, a museum has to be able to react quickly to events.” On the very day the new director took up his post, the Wien Museum set up an installation right in front of its door dealing with an urgent contemporary theme. Asylum-Space is an installation that engages with the influx of refugees into postwar Vienna, from the Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956 to the arrival of refugees from Bosnia in the 1990s.

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AUSSTELLUNGSPROGRAMM 2016

O.R. SCHATZ & CARRY HAUSER: In an Age of Extremes 28 January through 16 May 2016 (Opening: 27 January 2016)

Two Viennese artists between the two world wars, between Expressionism and New Objectivity, between the art of painting and the art of the book-making. Two painters awaiting rediscovery. Otto Rudolf Schatz (1900-1961) and Carry Hauser (1895-1985) are significant Austrian artists whose work has remained hidden in the shadows of their more famous contemporaries such as Kokoschka. Because the artists were active principally in the realm of graphic design, their work was rarely exhibited internationally. War, exile, and the radically shifting terrain of twentieth-century political systems left their stamp on the artists’ biographies.

The exhibition establishes a contrast between two incongruous artists whose work reflects a turbulent half-century. Placing the work of Schatz and Hauser into dialogue holds open the possibility of discussions about a broad spectrum of artistic expression ranging from Cubism and Expressionism through New Objectivity to the realism of the postwar years.

MEET ME AT THE PRATER! Viennese Pleasures since 1766 10 March through 21 August 2016 (Opening: 9 March 2016)

On the seventh of April 1766, Joseph II granted public access to the Prater imperial hunting grounds. The 250 th anniversary of this event presents a prime opportunity to focus on the diverse and varied history of the Prater.

In its early stages as a public space, the Prater was an area both rich in nature and near the center of the city – an area that offered wide-open space for spectacular mass events such as scenic firework displays and experimental hot-air balloon flights. Gastronomic enterprises -- lemonade stands, snack booths, guest houses, and coffee houses along the main promenade -- began settling into the Prater as early as the eighteenth century. The Panorama opened in 1801, giving visitors the illusion that they 4/9 were in a foreign city when they stood in the midst of the giant painting that surrounded them. In the Circus Gymnasticus, visitors could attend magic shows. With the rerouting of the Canal in the lead-up to the World Exhibition of 1873, the Prater entered into a period of efflorescence.

Imaginative and fanciful innovations like the flower parade (Blumenkorso) and the “Venice in Vienna” theme park contributed to the further enhancement of the Prater’s image. The Rotunda and the Riesenrad (Vienna’s giant Ferris wheel completed in 1987) quickly became Viennese landmarks.

After the First World War, the Prater’s entertainment offerings became increasingly modest. To be sure, large sporting events and the first exhibitions of the Wiener Messe (Vienna Fair) took place there until the Rotunda burned down in 1937, but all in all, the Prater became a more sober and matter-of-fact place. The time of luxuriant festivals and spectacular events came to a decisive end with the extensive destruction wrought during 1944 and 1945.

The Wien Museum has at its disposal a large collection of objects relating to the Prater. A portion of these objects is on permanent display at the Prater Museum located in the Planetarium. The “Prater 250 Years On” exhibition has also been conceived as an invitation to visit one of the Wien Museum’s less well-known sites.

MODERN ILLUSTRATION: Rudolf Weiss, Student of 14 April through 18 September 2016 (Opening: 13 April 2016)

In 2014 the Wien Museum received a gift from its “Friends of the Wien Museum Association” of over 200 drawings and plans from the artistic estate of the architect Rudolf Weiss (1890-1980), one of Otto Wagner’s last students. The drawings and illustrations count themselves among the best that have come down to us from Wagner’s legendary master school at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. In the most important laboratory for architecture of its time period, a distinctly Viennese modernity was visualized through the medium of illustration and disseminated throughout the world via key publications. The works of Wagner’s exemplary student trace an arc from strikingly orchestrated designs from the Wagner School, to plans for countryside dwellings, to the impressive history of building styles he composed in the 1950s with the support of his teaching at the Mödling Polytechnic Institute (Höhere Technische Lehranstalt).

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HATS! A Social History of the Covered Head 9 June through 30 October 2016 (Opening: 8 June 2016)

Alongside practical functions like protection against wind and weather, headwear was and is among the strongest of sartorial statements and is the most manifest visual signification of the wearer’s identity. The “Calabrese” (Kalabreser) was a hat worn by the revolutionaries of 1848, and served to mark the revolutionaries off from the reactionaries who favoured top hats. The Social Democrats struggled for labour rights while wearing workers’ caps; the Austro-fascists also had their hat of choice. Diverse headwear continues to separate conservatives from liberals, and the political left from right. The proscriptions against covering one’s face during demonstrations, along with the headscarf debate, demonstrate the extent to which the covering and veiling of the head and face continue to leave their mark on political discourse.

The exhibition unifies all of these aspects into a social history of the covered head, and provides insights both into the wearers of hats and the extent to which their choice of headwear is deeply anchored in the history of Viennese urban society down to the present. The bulk of the exhibition objects come from the Wien Museum’s fashion collection, one of Europe’s most significant.

SEX IN VIENNA. Desire. Control. Subversion 15 September 2016 through 15 January 2017 (Opening: 14 September 2016)

Sex. People have always done it. But the forms, representations, individual meanings, and social valuations attached to sex have changed over time. These changes have never been more profound than during the process of urbanization. The modern metropolis provided free spaces that made possible new forms of sexuality, both in terms of practices and identities. The urban milieu promised anonymity, an outlet from social control, and the fulfillment of sexual desires. Not only that: the city made possible new configurations of surveillance at the same time that its citizens invented new ways of disciplining and categorizing sex.

Through numerous case studies drawn from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the “Sex in Vienna” exhibition accounts for how the constant struggle between freedom and repression marked and continues to mark every moment of a sexual encounter – right from the first glance to the cigarette after. Who could look at whom, and in which way? Who should make the first move? Which forms of sexual desire could be acted out openly, and which ones only furtively? What kinds of consequences hung in the balance of each act or transgression? Despite the ambiguity, what is clear is that neither

6/9 moralistic sermons, nor economic systematization, nor police control was able to curb what took place in the city’s secluded bedrooms, secret spaces, and darkened corners.

ROBERT HAAS (Working Title) 24 November 2016 through February 2017 (Opening: 23 November 2016)

Robert Haas (b. 1898 Vienna, d.1997 New York) is among the most important representatives of photojournalism in interwar Austria. Alongside his work as a graphic artist, Haas learned photography between 1930 and 1932 from the Viennese studio photographer, Trude Fleischmann. He subsequently occupied himself as a photographer for the Austrian and international media during the 1930s. In Vienna, he created stirring works of social reportage and photos depicting scenes from everyday life. He also produced portraits, advertising photography, object photography, landscape and architectural photographs, as well as technical documents. From 1936, Haas spent several years as the official press photographer of the Salzburger Festspiele newspaper.

Although Robert Haas’s photographs reached a wide public during his time in Vienna, his work has since faded into unjustifiable obscurity, not least because he was forced to flee Vienna in 1938 along with countless other Jews. He fled first to London before moving on to New York, where he occupied himself primarily as a graphic designer. While in the USA, he continued to photograph personalities from public life.

The Wien Museum was recently able to acquire Robert Haas’s photographic archive. For the first time in an exhibition, his photographs will be presented on a large scale to a broad public.

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ASYLUM-SPACE 1 October through 31 October 2015

Matti Bunzl made a clear statement on the first day of his directorship. From October 1, the Asyl-Raum (Asylum-Space) installation has been on view directly in front of the Wien Museum on Karlsplatz. The project originated as a reaction to current events in Austria, and casts light on the history of Vienna since 1945 as a safe city for asylum seekers. The installation covers the refugee crises of Hungary (1956), Prague (1968) and Poland (early 1980s), as well as the arrival of Bosnian refugees during the 1990s. The project highlights not only moments of great solidarity and organizational bravura, but also moments of acute conflict surrounding the continually recurring demand for a restrictive immigration policy. The presentation offers historical photographs (some of which are part of the museum’s collection), evocative numerical figures that concretize the theme of the exhibition, and an explanation of the most important keywords in connection with flight, asylum, and migration.

As an installation, Asylum-Space constitutes a unique opportunity for civil society. It offers a potential place for collective reflection, one that is freely accessible around the clock. In addition, the text and photos that comprise the installation are available for download from the Wien Museum website for purposes such as school classes. The installation is on view through 31 October.

“Understanding the Wien Museum as a ‘laboratory of civil society’ – that notion was a watchword of my application dossier for the directorship of the Wien Museum. For me, the Asylum-Space project represents the first step in making this claim a reality,” explained Matti Bunzl, the new director of the Wien Museum.

Concept/Content: Matti Bunzl, Werner Michael Schwarz, Susanne Winkler Design: Alexander Kubik Graphics: Olaf Osten

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THE CHAPEL OF ST. VIRGIL Open from 12 December 2015

The Chapel of St. Virgil was discovered in 1973 during the building of the subway line and was integrated soon after into the Wien Museum network of sites. The underground chapel is one of the best-preserved Gothic interior spaces in Vienna. It dates back to around 1220/1230, and was conceived as the substructure for a chapel to be built in the early Gothic style. Around 1246, what is now the Chapel of St. Virgil was furnished with paintings covering the architectural joints and seams (Fugenmalereien), along with circumscribed crosses (Radkreuzen) in the niches. Later, the Chapel of Mary Magdalen was erected above this base. (The floor plan of the Chapel of Mary Magdalen is visible today as an outline in the cobblestones of Stephansplatz.)

After the building of a partially submerged mezzanine level above the subterranean structure, the chapel and the space beneath it were used for a variety of purposes from the early fourteenth century onward. The original building (that is, the Chapel of St. Virgil which is visible again today) served as a devotional chapel for a rich Viennese family with business ties. Among other things, the chapel was outfitted with an altar dedicated to St. Virgil, and the mezzanine level was set aside for use as an ossuary. As for the Chapel of Mary Magdalen, it was subsequently used as a cemetery chapel. At the same time, its galleries provided a gathering space for the “Schreiberzeche,” a confraternity of scribes and notaries.

The Chapel of St. Virgil was temporarily closed a few years back due to conservational concerns. After comprehensive restoration measures, the Chapel of St. Virgil will open its doors to the public again in late 2015. A newly constructed and visitor-friendly entrance on the subway thoroughfare level (U-Bahn-Passage) will give access to this fascinating sacred space, while a compact exhibition will provide a historical summary of medieval Vienna. With the reopening of the Chapel of St. Virgil, the Wien Museum will once again be present in the heart of the city.

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